What are the merits of stereotyping?
Stereotyping is really just a subset of the larger activity known as “conceptualization”. Our minds divide experience up into categories, discriminate to determine boundaries between things, and form concepts about the things thus formed. We then sort these concepts into categories, and the categories — when they relate to other people — are called “stereotypes”. This is all perfectly normal and useful behavior that any healthy brain performs with great efficiency. If you couldn’t do this, you would be mentally crippled and unable to function. If you tried to stop doing this, you would get tangled up in self-corrective thinking. The problem that we have is twofold: (a) we are generally unaware of the stereotypes we have (b) we believe that the stereotypes are adequate in and of themselves. (a) means that we don’t pay attention to the conceptualizing process — we don’t notice that it’s happening, and we don’t see that our perception of and responses to others are affected by the ster
